2024 DataOps Predictions - Part 2

Industry experts offer predictions on how DataOps will evolve and impact IT and business in 2024 ...

Start with: 2024 DataOps Predictions - Part 1

Predictive Analytics

Making decisions based on gut instinct is a thing of the past as organizations are fully realizing the power of analytics to make data-driven decisions, evidenced by the number of software platforms incorporating embedded analytics. Analytics will be all encompassing in 2024 as we become reliant on data for everything from everyday business research such as inventory and purchasing to predictive analytics that allow businesses to see into the future. Predictive analytics will drive businesses forward by helping them make informed, data-driven decisions, improve productivity, and increase sales/revenue — rather than merely reacting in response to events that have already taken place.
Casey Ciniello
Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

Edge analytics

Edge analytics will be a transformative force as the industry seeks to overcome the challenges posed by the explosive growth of data from interconnected devices and the advancements in AI. Data is not created equally; therefore, it should not be processed that way. Edge analytics processes data locally (at the edge) to quickly filter and preserve the essential information for more insight decisions in real time. In the coming years, this solution will become an integral part of all industries. The industry is already growing quickly, with Allied Market Research projecting that the edge analytics market will reach $47.4 billion by 2030, so business adoption is vital to have a competitive edge. Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation are already benefiting from edge analytics, and soon it will be necessary for all sectors that are looking for predictive maintenance, reduced costs, operational improvements, and live insights. Because of this growth, the marketplace for edge analytics will also thrive, with many compatible solutions introduced to offer tailored options that cater to the unique needs and use cases of all businesses.
Dia Ali
Global Solutions Leader, Data Intelligence, Hitachi Vantara

Decision Intelligence

One of businesses' biggest challenges in 2024 will be transforming reams of raw data into meaningful insights that can guide decisions that can make or break a company. The journey from insights to decision intelligence marks a transformative era in how organizations harness the raw power of data. We are gradually seeing the shift to decision intelligence as businesses acquire skills, adopt new tools, and most of all, embrace a data-driven mindset. With the help of decision intelligence, organizations will be empowered to make more effective, efficient, and responsible decisions by integrating data, technology, and human expertise. As data continues to shape the future, decision intelligence remains essential for success.”
Casey Ciniello
Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

First party data

Whether you are trying to feed data into an LLM or simply trying to get ahead of the depreciation of third-party cookies, being able to securely access and harness first-party data is going to be instrumental to how businesses reach their customers as well as build intelligent features and automated workflows in 2024. The reality is that organizations are sitting on a mountain of unstructured customer data within users inboxes. Rather than pour money into spotty third-party insights or outsourcing machine learning models, companies can simply look inward at the data they already own and look to analyze and translate first-party data into positive business outcomes.
Christine Spang
Co-Founder and CTO, Nylas

Data Fabrics

The adoption of ML and AI-enabled Data Fabrics is driven by the explosion and complexity of data. Data Fabrics will be essential in an Industry v4.0 future, with adoption targeted for 2024 and beyond to handle the required data complexity, management, and automation. Utilizing Data Fabrics will make it easier to enforce GDPR compliance, data masking, and other measures. By 2024, 25% of data management vendors are expected to provide a complete framework for data fabric, up from 5% today (Gartner).
Avishai Sharlin
GM, Amdocs Technology

Data Lakes

While some companies may choose to collect less data, increasing regulatory requirements mean that most teams have no choice but to do more with less. As they struggle to find cost-effective means to store data of unpredictable value, companies are increasingly reconsidering data lakes. Once considered the final resting place for unstructured data, I see the migration to data lakes accelerating in 2024, driven by increasing storage costs, as well as advancements in query capabilities across data lakes and object storage, and the comparative ease with which data can be routed into them. With the ability to quickly and cost-effectively search large data stores, companies will start using data lakes as a first stop, rather than a final destination for their data. This will cause a shift of data volumes out of analytics platforms and hot storage into data lakes.
Nick Heudecker
Senior Director, Market Strategy & Competitive Intelligence, Cribl

Data Provenance

In 2024, the digital landscape will continue to see exponential growth in processing power and AI capability. This heightens the need for immutable audit trails and long-term data integrity to establish data provenance. Over the past 12 months, we saw gen AI explode and ultimately expose a massive data provenance problem. 2024 looks to be the year that data provenance becomes more important than ever, and this will be key for AI safety. As trust is the fuel of the digital world, businesses must prioritize transparency, safety, provenance, and accountability. Immutable audit trails not only provide a missing safeguard for data but also provide a verifiable history of every event and transaction in its journey, ensuring trust and reliability in an increasingly interconnected and data-driven environment. With the rise of gen AI, the need for provenance only grows as AI accelerates in capability. Data provenance is essential technology that everybody needs. But we won't need 1,000 different ways to provide long-term integrity for provenance metadata. Next year we will see standards emerge that support open and interoperable methods needed across the internet. There are groups at the IETF and ISO and other communities like the Content Authenticity Initiative that are putting the foundations in place that will provide these capabilities and we should expect companies broadly to adopt and apply them.
Rusty Cumpston
CEO, DataTrails

Data Governance Shifts Left

Data governance will "shift left" as companies collect more data for generative AI. As businesses collect larger volumes of data for their AI initiatives, they must add a governance layer to make the data useful. It's much easier and more efficient to add governance when data is collected, and we will see data governance shift left next year to accommodate this need. Governance investments are critical as they ensure data is reliable and can be made available quickly for use in applications. This governance includes recording the provenance of data, ensuring it is accurate, adding metadata to make it easier to work with, and including it in a catalog so teams know it's available. Storing unstructured and ungoverned data in a data lake makes it easier to save everything, but it becomes progressively more expensive to use any of this data. Companies must work smarter and shift processing to the left as much as possible. This has several benefits. Adding governance sooner means the data is available more quickly, so developers can work with more timely data. It also allows an organization to discard data without future value, reducing storage costs and liability. In 2024, more companies will recognize these benefits and apply data governance earlier.
Andrew Sellers
Head of Technology Strategy, Confluent

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

2024 DataOps Predictions - Part 2

Industry experts offer predictions on how DataOps will evolve and impact IT and business in 2024 ...

Start with: 2024 DataOps Predictions - Part 1

Predictive Analytics

Making decisions based on gut instinct is a thing of the past as organizations are fully realizing the power of analytics to make data-driven decisions, evidenced by the number of software platforms incorporating embedded analytics. Analytics will be all encompassing in 2024 as we become reliant on data for everything from everyday business research such as inventory and purchasing to predictive analytics that allow businesses to see into the future. Predictive analytics will drive businesses forward by helping them make informed, data-driven decisions, improve productivity, and increase sales/revenue — rather than merely reacting in response to events that have already taken place.
Casey Ciniello
Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

Edge analytics

Edge analytics will be a transformative force as the industry seeks to overcome the challenges posed by the explosive growth of data from interconnected devices and the advancements in AI. Data is not created equally; therefore, it should not be processed that way. Edge analytics processes data locally (at the edge) to quickly filter and preserve the essential information for more insight decisions in real time. In the coming years, this solution will become an integral part of all industries. The industry is already growing quickly, with Allied Market Research projecting that the edge analytics market will reach $47.4 billion by 2030, so business adoption is vital to have a competitive edge. Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation are already benefiting from edge analytics, and soon it will be necessary for all sectors that are looking for predictive maintenance, reduced costs, operational improvements, and live insights. Because of this growth, the marketplace for edge analytics will also thrive, with many compatible solutions introduced to offer tailored options that cater to the unique needs and use cases of all businesses.
Dia Ali
Global Solutions Leader, Data Intelligence, Hitachi Vantara

Decision Intelligence

One of businesses' biggest challenges in 2024 will be transforming reams of raw data into meaningful insights that can guide decisions that can make or break a company. The journey from insights to decision intelligence marks a transformative era in how organizations harness the raw power of data. We are gradually seeing the shift to decision intelligence as businesses acquire skills, adopt new tools, and most of all, embrace a data-driven mindset. With the help of decision intelligence, organizations will be empowered to make more effective, efficient, and responsible decisions by integrating data, technology, and human expertise. As data continues to shape the future, decision intelligence remains essential for success.”
Casey Ciniello
Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

First party data

Whether you are trying to feed data into an LLM or simply trying to get ahead of the depreciation of third-party cookies, being able to securely access and harness first-party data is going to be instrumental to how businesses reach their customers as well as build intelligent features and automated workflows in 2024. The reality is that organizations are sitting on a mountain of unstructured customer data within users inboxes. Rather than pour money into spotty third-party insights or outsourcing machine learning models, companies can simply look inward at the data they already own and look to analyze and translate first-party data into positive business outcomes.
Christine Spang
Co-Founder and CTO, Nylas

Data Fabrics

The adoption of ML and AI-enabled Data Fabrics is driven by the explosion and complexity of data. Data Fabrics will be essential in an Industry v4.0 future, with adoption targeted for 2024 and beyond to handle the required data complexity, management, and automation. Utilizing Data Fabrics will make it easier to enforce GDPR compliance, data masking, and other measures. By 2024, 25% of data management vendors are expected to provide a complete framework for data fabric, up from 5% today (Gartner).
Avishai Sharlin
GM, Amdocs Technology

Data Lakes

While some companies may choose to collect less data, increasing regulatory requirements mean that most teams have no choice but to do more with less. As they struggle to find cost-effective means to store data of unpredictable value, companies are increasingly reconsidering data lakes. Once considered the final resting place for unstructured data, I see the migration to data lakes accelerating in 2024, driven by increasing storage costs, as well as advancements in query capabilities across data lakes and object storage, and the comparative ease with which data can be routed into them. With the ability to quickly and cost-effectively search large data stores, companies will start using data lakes as a first stop, rather than a final destination for their data. This will cause a shift of data volumes out of analytics platforms and hot storage into data lakes.
Nick Heudecker
Senior Director, Market Strategy & Competitive Intelligence, Cribl

Data Provenance

In 2024, the digital landscape will continue to see exponential growth in processing power and AI capability. This heightens the need for immutable audit trails and long-term data integrity to establish data provenance. Over the past 12 months, we saw gen AI explode and ultimately expose a massive data provenance problem. 2024 looks to be the year that data provenance becomes more important than ever, and this will be key for AI safety. As trust is the fuel of the digital world, businesses must prioritize transparency, safety, provenance, and accountability. Immutable audit trails not only provide a missing safeguard for data but also provide a verifiable history of every event and transaction in its journey, ensuring trust and reliability in an increasingly interconnected and data-driven environment. With the rise of gen AI, the need for provenance only grows as AI accelerates in capability. Data provenance is essential technology that everybody needs. But we won't need 1,000 different ways to provide long-term integrity for provenance metadata. Next year we will see standards emerge that support open and interoperable methods needed across the internet. There are groups at the IETF and ISO and other communities like the Content Authenticity Initiative that are putting the foundations in place that will provide these capabilities and we should expect companies broadly to adopt and apply them.
Rusty Cumpston
CEO, DataTrails

Data Governance Shifts Left

Data governance will "shift left" as companies collect more data for generative AI. As businesses collect larger volumes of data for their AI initiatives, they must add a governance layer to make the data useful. It's much easier and more efficient to add governance when data is collected, and we will see data governance shift left next year to accommodate this need. Governance investments are critical as they ensure data is reliable and can be made available quickly for use in applications. This governance includes recording the provenance of data, ensuring it is accurate, adding metadata to make it easier to work with, and including it in a catalog so teams know it's available. Storing unstructured and ungoverned data in a data lake makes it easier to save everything, but it becomes progressively more expensive to use any of this data. Companies must work smarter and shift processing to the left as much as possible. This has several benefits. Adding governance sooner means the data is available more quickly, so developers can work with more timely data. It also allows an organization to discard data without future value, reducing storage costs and liability. In 2024, more companies will recognize these benefits and apply data governance earlier.
Andrew Sellers
Head of Technology Strategy, Confluent

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...